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Surveillance Systems

Description

CRE are multidrug-resistant bacteria associated with up to 50 percent mortality in infected persons. CRE are increasingly problematic in Illinois healthcare facilities, especially long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs); therefore, Illinois implemented the eXtensively Drug-Resistant Organism (XDRO) registry (www.xdro. org). Mathematical models have identified patient sharing between healthcare facilities as a mechanism for regional spread, and the importance of each facility within a network can be quantified using social network analysis. Degree centrality is a measure representing the number of facilities with which a facility has shared at least one patient, and hence, a measure of “risk” of receiving a CRE colonized patient. Eigenvector centrality is more sophisticated in that it quantifies how well a given node is connected to other “wellconnected” nodes. We expect that facilities that have high degree and/or eigenvector centrality – and, thus, higher “risk” of encountering a CRE colonized patient – will have higher incidence of CRE, as will facilities that share patients with LTACHs. Understanding facilitylevel characteristics that predict higher CRE rates will enhance the XDRO registry’s usefulness as a surveillance tool.

Objective

To enhance CRE surveillance and communication by incorporating social network measures to quantify patient sharing between facilities.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

This report is designed to aid state, territorial, tribal, and local public health leaders as they improve their capacity to achieve situational awareness during a public health emergency. We intend this report to serve as a concise reference work public health leaders can use to help design and manage biosurveillance systems to be used during an anticipated public health emergency.

Submitted by uysz on
Description

The outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003, influenza A (H1N1) in 2009 and Ebola in 2014 have shown increasingly that infectious diseases can spread globally in a short timeframe, affecting both high- and low-income countries. Taking action to mitigate the impact of future crises relies on sharing public health surveillance data across national borders in an efficient and effective way. However, data users, particularly in high-income countries, often use surveillance data, particularly from low- and middle-income countries, with little or no benefit to the data generator. As Indonesia’s refusal to share influenza virus sequences during the 2006 H5N1 outbreak illustrates, this imbalance increases reluctance to share and jeopardizes the global good that can be achieved. In order to share public health surveillance data internationally in an equitable way, technical, political, ethical, and legal issues need to be addressed. The Centre on Global Health Security at Chatham House is producing guidance that will address both the policy and technical issues with the aim of establishing new norms so that data can be shared in an open, transparent and equitable way.

Objective

To address both the policy and technical issues of sharing public health surveillance data across national borders with the aim of establishing new norms so that data can be shared in an open, transparent and equitable way.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
Description

The estimated incidence of imported malaria in France is about 4,000 cases per year (1). The epidemiological surveillance of malaria in France is mainly based on a hospital laboratory surveillance network, which captures around 50% of cases. There is no comprehensive population surveillance. The SNIIRAM provides data about hospital stays and outpatient drug reimbursements, procedures, examinations and sickness leaves for almost the whole French population(2). We aimed to evaluate the usefulness of the SNIIRAM for implementing epidemiological surveillance of malaria.

Objective

Estimate the accuracy of the French ational ealth nsurance nformation ystem (SNIIRAM) as a support for a nationwide malaria surveillance

Submitted by aising on
Description

Real-time syndromic surveillance requires daily surveillance of a range of health data sources. Most real-time data sources from health care systems exhibit large day of the week fluctuations as service provision and patient behaviour varies by day of the week. Regular day of the week effects are further complicated by the occurrence of public holidays (usually 8 per year in England), which can limit the availability of certain services and affect patient behaviour. Simple seven day moving averages fail to provide a smoothed trend around public holidays and can lead to false alarms or potentially delays in detection of outbreaks.

Objective

To develop smoothing techniques for daily syndromic surveillance data that allow for the easier identification of trends and unusual activity independent of day of the week and holiday effects.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
Description

Since 2003 some Arizona counties have followed mosquito surveillance protocols to trap the West Nile Virus vector, Culex spp., using CO2 traps. Despite low sensitivity of these traps to detect Aedes spp., one out of seven CO2 traps deployed in Santa Cruz County detected Aedes aegypti in 2014. Enhancing surveillance for Aedes spp. in this region is critical, given that local transmission of dengue has occured across the border in Nogales, Sonora. Limited resources in Santa Cruz County have previously inhibited efforts to enhance mosquito surveillance . To broaden the reach of county surveillance, we implemented a community participatory project by engaging residents to conduct ovitrapping, a non-technical trap that attracts Aedes spp.

Objective

The objective of this work is to develop an efficient communitybased strategy to enhance mosquito surveillance for Aedes spp., vector for chikungunya and dengue viruses, in Santa Cruz County on the U.S.-Mexico border. We aim to determine vector presence, distribution, and seasonality by using ovitraps maintained by community members.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
Description

When hazardous materials or products emerge in the market, injury prevention researchers take action to promote awareness and legislation with the goal to prevent further injuries. This cannot be achieved without reliable data on trends and outcomes identifying large cohorts with the injury of interest. Lags in providing such data will delay knowledge sharing to prevent avoidable and potentially fatal injuries.

Glass tables and earth magnets are two examples of consumer products with potential for significant injuries, particularly to children. Magnet toys caused a large number of injuries with associated morbidity and mortality. For months there were no available data to support policy or prevention initiatives. Similarly, certain disease and injury mechanisms such as penetrating oral trauma are not included as structured data and cannot be collected using ICD-9/ICD-10 codes. Data on these types of injury mechanisms exist exclusively within the clinical narrative.

Objective

• Describe injury-related surveillance using clinical narratives within electronic health records

• Present a user friendly, physician transferrable operated natural language processing (NLP) module, which can identify injury related events from electronic health record narratives

• Present a variety of use cases and results

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
Description

Traditional surveillance methods, such as registries that require manual validation of every diabetes case or questionnaires, are resource intensive and associated with considerable delay in reporting results. An EHR-based surveillance system may be more efficient for sustained monitoring of the incidence and prevalence of childhood diabetes, so as to inform health care needs for this growing population.

Objective

The study goal was to develop an efficient surveillance approach for childhood diabetes across two large Southeastern US public academic health care systems, using electronic health record (EHR) data.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
Description

Influenza is not a notifiable disease in Kansas; patient-level influenza data is not reported to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE). Kansas’ primary method of influenza surveillance is the U.S. Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet), a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state health departments. During the 2014-2015 influenza surveillance period (September 28, 2014 through May 16, 2015), 35 health care providers (20 family practice clinics, nine hospital emergency departments, four university student health centers, and two pediatric clinics) served as ILINet sites. Providers were instructed to report the previous week’s influenzalike illness (ILI) data, including the number of patients who met the ILI case definition and the total number of patients seen, by 11:00 AM each Tuesday. An average of 16 providers (45%) met the deadline each week.

Objective

Measure the correlation between Influenza-like Illness (ILI) data collected by the U.S. Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet) and the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) in Kansas for the 2014-2015 influenza surveillance period.

Submitted by rmathes on
Description

The recent Ebola outbreak has been described as unprecedented and its public health impact in terms of morbidity, mortality and coverage has been far greater than previously experienced. This outbreak has revealed many weaknesses and inadequacies for disease surveillance and response systems in Africa due to underqualified staff, cultural beliefs and sometimes, lack of trust for formal health care sector performance. Since 2014, Ghana had high risk of seeing EVD cases.

Objective

The objective of this study was to assess the EVD surveillance and response preparedness among frontline health workers in northern Ghana.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on